One day when he was walking through the village he heard a woman say as he passed--"There he goes! I pity un, poor old man!" The insult went into him like a knife. He turned round and gave the woman his fiercest scowl. Old indeed! Had one ever heard of such a thing! old!--and he could guide the plough and dig furrows in the marl, and stack, and reap with any of 'em. Old!--why, he was only-- --He was eighty. He suddenly realised that, after all, he _was_ old. He did not carry himself as erectly as he had used; there were pains and stiffness in his limbs and rheumatic swellings in his joints. His hair was white, and his once lusty arms were now all shrivelled skin and sinew, with the ossified veins standing out hard and grey. He was what Harry was always calling himself--"only a poor old man"--a poor old man who had lost his son, whom cottage women pitied from their doorsteps--and be hemmed to them, the sluts! § 15. Meantime affairs at Grandturzel were going from bad to worse. Reuben did not speak much about Grandturzel, but he watched it all the same, and as time wore on a look of quiet satisfaction would overspread his face when it was mentioned at the Cocks. He watched the tiles drip gradually off its barn roofs, he watched the thatch of its haggards peel and moult, he watched the oasts lose their black coats of tar, while the wind battered off their caps, and the skeleton poles stuck up forlornly from their turrets. Holes wore in the neat house-front, windows were broken and not mended, torn curtains waved signals of distress. It was only a question of waiting. Reuben often went to the Cocks, for he had heard it said that one's beer-drinking capacities diminished with old age, and he was afraid that if he stayed away, men would think it was on that account. So he went frequently, particularly if the weather was of a kind to keep old people at home. He did not talk much, preferring to listen to what was said, sitting quietly at his table in the corner, with the quart of Barclay and Perkins's mild which had been his evening drink from a boy. It was at the Cocks that he learned most of Grandturzel's straits, though he occasionally made visits of inspection. Realf had messed his hops that autumn, and the popular verdict was that he could not possibly hold out much longer. "Wot'll become of him, I wäonder?" asked Hilder, the new man at Socknersh. "Someone 'ull buy him up, I reckon," and young Coalbran, who had succeeded his father at Doozes, winked at the rest of the bar, and the bar to a man turned round and stared at old Reuben, who drew himself up, but said nothing. "Wot d'you think of Grandturzel, Mus' Backfield?" someone asked waggishly. "Naun," said Reuben; "I'm waiting." He did not have to wait long. A few days later he was told that somebody wanted to see him, and in the parlour found his daughter Tilly.